Simphiwe Ndzube

Simphiwe Ndzube is an artist from Cape Town, South Africa, who’s now based in L.A. He made a new sculpture for the biennial informed by South African folklore. It’s a 6-foot-tall, 20-foot-long creature, a chimera, made of clay and featuring fake eyelashes and dentures, which speaks to both healing and the future.

Introduction: Contemporary African painters

Today we take on the African continent, scoping its artistic landscape for the very best African painters you need to know. The contemporary era seems to run parallel with post-colonialism. The decolonization of the African nations in the post-war era resulted in a period of substantial change and upheaval.

In his first solo United States museum exhibition, South African artist Simphiwe Ndzube wove his own brand of magical realism with the iconography of “The Garden of Earthly Delights” by artist Hieronymous Bosch in a radical exploration of global water scarcity. The most unique hallmark of Ndzube’s work are figures that physically emerge from the canvas with strange limbs and sewn-on clothing. The choice troubles the space between real and imagined, sculpture and painting, but more importantly, it pushes the discomforts of the subject into the gallery, sharing air with the viewer. Today, Eden is wherever water springs.

SCI-Arc Channel tours the intricacies of Simphiwe Ndzube's studio and background, taking a close look at two of his recent exhibitions: Like the Snake that Fed the Chameleon at Nicodim Gallery and Oracles of the Pink Universe at the Denver Art Museum.

A conversation about the art of telling stories with the South African artist Simphiwe Ndzube, who works between Cape Town and Los Angeles and whose first solo US museum exhibition opens this month at the Denver Art Museum, and the renowned writer Zakes Mda, whose novels are widely read throughout South Africa and beyond. The two dissect their magical realist stories of post-apartheid South Africa and their experiences of America on the page and on canvas—and try to locate the source of their own magic.

This episode is guest-hosted by Kyla McMillan, a director at David Zwirner.

The Venezuelan-American musician-painter and the South African multimedia artist talk about their upbringings, inspirations, and making art with a sense of humor in this interview with Michael Slenske.

Simphiwe Ndzube talks about his childhood growing up in South Africa and how as an artist he uses his Magical Realist style to blend past experiences with fantasy. Ndzube talks about following his inner child as an intuitive guide to his art making which blends sculpture, painting, and assemblage. Ndzube discusses art-making as a tool for unpacking traumas, and how he uses his own practice to process past experiences. 

Ndzube reimagines Black bodies as mythical beings capable of inhabiting multiple dimensions. His pieces tend to blend found objects, paintings, sculptures, and textiles in vibrant colors. 

Ndzube’s work is like a kaleidoscope in which harsh reality enmeshes with hallucination and worlds weave in and out of each other, fantastic color exploding at their intersections. At once flamboyant and mystical, his practice is populated by evanescent figures that sprawl out in his paintings and strut through his exhibitions as sculptures.

Simphiwe Ndzube’s vivid scenes — painting, sculpture, assemblage, and installation—realize figurative forms as protrusions from colorfully uncanny landscapes. Bright and immediately involving, the commanding playfulness of his compositions serve an intensity that renders history’s hallucination of the human as a creaturely deformation of territory and affective possibility. In this studio visit, Ndzube reflects on the decolonial imperative of the South African art scene that nurtured and educated him, his relation to houseless residents of LA, and his recent fascination with tongues and umbrellas.

Produced by Vanity Fair with Genesis. South African artist Simphiwe Ndzube takes Vanity Fair and Genesis through his day in Los Angeles, sharing his unique creative process and the inspiration behind some of his most distinctive work.